| How to Rig an Election in the United States | 1 comment |
 11 Jul 2003 @ 12:46, by Raymond PowersHow to Rig an Election in the United States Sludge Report #154 – Bigger Than Watergate! By C.D. Sludge Tuesday 08 July 2003 The story you are about to read is in this writer's view the biggest political scandal in American history, if not global history. And it is being broken today here in New Zealand. This story cuts to the bone the machinery of democracy in America today. Democracy is the only protection we have against despotic and arbitrary government, and this story is deeply disturbing. Imagine if you will that you are a political interest group that wishes to control forevermore the levers of power. Imagine further that you know you are likely to implement a highly unpopular political agenda, and you do not wish to be removed by a ballot driven backlash. One way to accomplish this outcome would be to adopt the Mugabe (Zimbabwe) or Hun Sen (Cambodia) approach. You agree to hold elections, but simultaneously arrest, imprison and beat your opponents and their supporters. You stuff ballot boxes, disenfranchise voters who are unlikely to vote for you, distort electoral boundaries and provide insufficient polling stations in areas full of opposition supporters. However as so many despots have discovered, eventually such techniques always fail – often violently. Hence, if you are a truly ambitious political dynasty you have to be a bit more subtle about your methods. Imagine then if it were possible to somehow subvert the voting process itself in such a way that you could steal elections without anybody knowing. Imagine for example if you could: secure control of the companies that make the voting machines and vote counting software; centralise vote counting systems, and politicise their supervision; legislate for the adoption of such systems throughout your domain, and provide large amounts of money for the purchase of these systems; establish systems of vote counting that effectively prevent anybody on the ground in the election – at a booth or precinct level - from seeing what is happening at a micro-level; get all the major media to sign up to a single exit-polling system that you also control – removing the risk of exit-polling showing up your shenanigans. And imagine further that you install a backdoor, or numerous backdoors, in the vote counting systems you have built that enable you to manipulate the tabulation of results in real time as they are coming in. Such a system would enable you to intervene in precisely the minimum number of races necessary to ensure that you won a majority on election night. On the basis of polling you could pick your marginal seats and thus keep your tweaking to a bare minimum. Such a system would enable you to minimise the risks of discovery of your activities. Such a system would enable you to target and remove individual political opponents who were too successful, too popular or too inquisitive. And most importantly of all, such a system would enable you to accomplish all the above without the public being in the least aware of what you were doing. When confronted with the awfulness of your programme they would be forced to concede that at least it is the result of a democratic process. How To Rig An Election In The United States So how would such a system actually work? Well one way to run such a corrupt electoral system might look like this: Each voting precinct (or booth) could be fitted with electronic voting systems, optical scanning systems, punch card voting systems or the more modern touchscreen electronic voting machines; At the close of play each day the booth/precinct supervisor could be under instructions to compile an electronic record of the votes cast in their booth; They might print out a report that contains only the details of the total votes count for that precinct/booth, and then file via modem the full electronic record of votes through to the County supervisor; The County Supervisor could be equipped with a special piece of software and a bank of modems that enables all these results to be received and tabulated in the internals of the computer; The County Supervisors themselves could be assured that their system was bullet proof, certified and contained tamper-protection mechanisms par excellence; The Country Supervisor could be given a range of tools for looking at the data within this software, but nothing to enable them to directly manipulate the results; But unbeknownst to the County Supervisor the software could actually create three separate records of the voting data; Meanwhile - also unbeknownst to the County Supervisor - these three tables of voting data could be in fact completely insecure and accessible simply through a common database programme, say Microsoft Access; Having the three tables would enable you to keep the real data in place – so the system could pass spot tests on individual precincts and booth results (should a precinct supervisor be particularly astute) -while simultaneously enabling you to manipulate the bottom line result; Finally you might also enhance the election hacker's powers by including within the software a utility to enable them to cover their tracks by changing the date and time stamps on files and remove evidence of your tampering. Read On...Fantasy Becomes Reality |